Hello! It’s me.

There’s something utterly blissful about waltzing through a hardware store while Dad buys nuts & washers to fix the battery harness, #amirite?

We spent the past few days with MY friends … Tim, Kathy, Ken, Sue. I invited Mom & Dad to spend time with them too.

But the overriding theme of the weekend was cats … meaning that I know MY friends own cats and are keeping the cats from me. Oh, I tried to get to them, believe me, I tried.

Here kitty kitty!!

When the cat saunters upstairs, my job becomes a lot harder.

When the cat is inside the house and I’m banished to the outside deck, well, the job is just plain impossible.

Here’s my preferred method for trying to engage with a cat.

1. Walk up to the cat.
2. Bark as loud as I possibly can while wiggling my rear end in an effort to encourage light-hearted play. Thirty to forty seconds of loud, unfettered barking usually does the job.

Here’s the typical outcome of my efforts.

1. Cat runs away, looking at me as if I have horns crawling out of my tummy.

Mom and Dad continued their food-based rampage through the Pacific Northwest.

Yesterday, we boarded a ferry. For a moment I thought to myself, “are we going to Friday Harbor (because that’s where we once lived)”???

Mom told me that we’re going to Friday Harbor in early August … but it turns out we did a quick “bonus visit” this weekend! And I got to hike at Lime Kiln State Park … one of my favorite hikes in the world!!

Maybe the saddest part of the day was learning that the resident orcas have only been by the lighthouse twice in the past seven weeks. They used to go by twice a day (or more).

This only happens if there aren’t any king salmon in the ocean to eat.

Lemme tell you … I know what it is like when food isn’t available. It’s not fun! So I feel for the orcas. And I struggle with a world where so few people seem to care. If it would help, I’d bark at the top of my lungs … just like I do when I’m trying to engage with a cat. But it won’t help. I need humans to “do something”.

Meanwhile, Mom & Dad even got a chance to play some pickleball on this leg of the trip.

Dad tells me that we’re looking into solutions for our entry door frame tomorrow. That sounds like a ton of fun. If I bark at the top of my lungs, maybe I could manifest a kitty tomorrow. That would spice things up!!